Seagate Prepping Momentus Encrypted Drives

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Seagate’s Momentus 5400 FDE.2 (Full Disk Encryption 2) drives are set to ship in early 2007, allowing consumers to have built-in encryption on the disks to protect their data from nosy intruders. These drives, which are of the 2.5-inch, 5400RPM kin designed for notebooks, will require you to have some form of authentication before it’s able to be read from at all. Seagate’s looking to other equipment manufacturers to add in either fingerprint or other smart card authentication to machines which use this drive.

So far no PC maker has actually announced support for the drive – something that’s, you know, important – but Seagate is already calling the technology “DriveTrust” in preparation for that day. Seeing as the previous generation Momentus 5400 FDE drives were announced June 2006 and still don’t have PC support, Seagate called that one a “proof-of-concept product” to save face.

So how much more will you have to pay to keep your data automatically secure? Less than $100, actually, which is around the same as comparable software solutions. Since it’s almost always faster to do things on hardware, this price isn’t too bad. But then again, if all you’re doing is keeping your MP3s and emails to your wife on your hard drive, you probably won’t need encryption at all.